By Michelle (Graceful, Faith in the Everyday)
I sighed heavy and groaned as I slid the folded paper from the envelope and read the opening lines:
“Michelle DeRusha, you are hereby summoned and notified that you have been selected to serve as a juror during the two-week jury term beginning May 10. You are required to appear in Lancaster County District Court as instructed below.”
Jury duty.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always viewed jury duty as a giant pain in the neck. One simple letter and my well-oiled life turns upside-down. Now suddenly there were arrangements to make with my employer, childcare to schedule, transportation to and from school to arrange – to say nothing of the hours and hours of sitting in a stale, airless courthouse waiting room.
I appeared at the Hall of Justice at my appointed time. The waiting area was packed tight, row upon row of potential jurors crunched into folding chairs. An older woman motioned to me from across the room, pointing at an empty seat next to her, and I graciously squeezed in, glad not to have to lean against the wall with my achy back.
We made small talk about the chilly weather, the drizzle, the whipping wind. “So how long have you been sitting here?” I asked her.
“Since 1,” she answered. I looked at my watch and sighed.
As our chattering quieted I surveyed the room.
So many faces, so many different walks of life, I thought to myself, gazing at my neighbors. There were the business executives, buttoned into pin stripes, muttering quietly into cell phones, typing furiously on Backberrys. And the retirees, clutching bulky handbags to chests, bent over Sudoku and Newsweek. A few teens in tattoos and tee shirts slouched in chairs. A soccer mom tottered on the edge of her seat, designer dark-wash brushing well-worn dungarees. African-Americans, Asian-Americans, an Indian man, a woman wearing a dark head covering. A young man dozed, elbow propped on knee, faced slumped into hand. A tired-looking woman with a pale face and grey roots read a romance novel.
Two aisles ahead, three or four jurors broke into amicable conversation, complaining good-naturedly, their laughing and joking piercing the quiet.
Pages turned. Bodies shifted. Legs crossed and uncrossed.
We waited.
And then it dawned on me, a sudden, sharp realization: we need to take care of one another. All of us need to do our part. Without exception.
“This is it,” I thought. “This is life happening right here. Here we sit, in it together.”
Observing all those different people together in once place – young and old, wealthy and not, professional and working-class, black and white – I realized the simple truth: we are here, on this Earth, for a purpose. We are here to take care of one other, to love one another. To serve.
“No man is an island entire of itself,” the poet John Donne wrote. “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the Bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
It’s not just death that connects us but all of life – its thrills and agonies, mountains and valleys, rains and droughts. And the action we take – whether good or bad – impacts so much more than our own selves.
Frederick Buechner says it like this:
“As we move around this world and as we act with kindness, perhaps, or with indifference, or with hostility, toward the people we meet, we too are setting the great spider web a-tremble. The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt.”
I wasn’t selected as a juror last week. After about an hour in the waiting room, 36 of us filed into a courtroom, where the district judge informed us that the plaintive had issued a plea just moments before the trial was set to begin.
But as I walked past the metal detector, down the concrete steps and into the howling wind, I realized I had learned a lesson about duty – civic and otherwise – just the same. We touch lives every day – family, friends, neighbors, strangers. We set the great spider web a-tremble. It's up to each one of us to decide how that touch will be felt.
Michelle is a Christian wife and mother of two originally from Massachusetts now living in Nebraska. She is a part-time writer, editor and fundraiser for Nebraska PBS/NPR. Michelle loves to write about how her family illuminates God's presence in her everyday life, and on finding (and keeping) faith in the everyday. Michelle enjoys reading, running and writing. Be sure to go visit her blog, Graceful, Faith in the Everyday.